The Fever : How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

Shah, Sonia

ISBN 10: 0374230013 / ISBN 13: 9780374230012

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010

About this Item

Former library copy. Pages intact with minimal writing/highlighting. The binding may be loose and creased. Dust jackets/supplements are not included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good.

Seller Inventory # GRP102415397

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Fever : How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374230013
• ISBN 13: 9780374230012
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 1.162 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names—and opened their pocketbooks—in hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren’t we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we’ve known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly 1 million of them?

In The Fever, the journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer these questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives. Through the centuries, she finds, we’ve invested our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, and invariably those hopes have been dashed. From the settling of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wars and the advances of the Industrial Revolution, Shah tracks malaria’s jagged ascent and the tragedies in its wake, revealing a parasite every bit as persistent as the insects that carry it. With distinguished prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, devastating history of this long-standing thorn in the side of humanity.

About the Author

Sonia Shah is a science journalist and author of the prize-winning The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients, named one of the best consumer health books of 2006 by Library Journal, and Crude: the Story of Oil. A former writing fellow of The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, her writing has appeared in The Lancet, The Nation, New Scientist and elsewhere.